A VIEW TO A KILL by John Brosnan from Starburst #85
Advance word-of-mouth on this was that it was the worst James Bond yet, so I went to the screening prepared to suffer. Imagine my astonishment when I discovered that it wasn’t half as bad as I expected. On the contrary, it ranks as probably the best Roger Moore/Broccoli Bond movie since The Spy who Loved Me. It may be just another sign of my brain softening due to advancing old age, but I even found Moore himself quite bearable in the role this time round. And despite his 57 years he looked younger and fitter than he did in Octopussy. Does this mean I’ve cracked up completely?
Not that I don’t have criticisms of the movie. As usual it’s too long. At least 20 minutes could have been lopped from its 2 hour 11 minute running time, and there are several sequences that slow the film down to a dead-stop (for example, the sequence involving Fiona Fullerton’s Russian agent). As usual, again. I found the sexual double entendres embarrassingly old fashioned and unamusing, with the exception of the one quipped by Bond (and no doubt ad-libbed by Moore) during the fire-engine chase sequence through San Francisco (as this is a family magazine I shall not elaborate).
But the reason - or one of them - why A View to a Kill works better than the last few Bonds is that the makers have returned to old formula of featuring a super-villain with an over-the-top villainous scheme. In this case it’s a reworking of the plot of Goldfinger with the villain. Max Zorin (Christopher Walken, in a variable performance) planning to destroy California’s micro-chip industries in order to increase the value of his own electronics empire, just as Goldfinger tried to increase the value of his gold stocks by destroying Fort Knox.
Another asset to the movie is Grace Jones as Zorin’s henchwoman May Day. She may not be a great actress, but she has a terrific screen presence, which is well exploited on this occasion. She also has an impressive death scene, going out with a bang reminiscent of Cagey’s explosive climax in White Heat.
Unfortunately. however, the expected fight scene between her and Bond never occurs, which rather lets down the film’s publicity campaign (“Has James Bond Finally Met His match?’’), which suggests that such a confrontation will be the high point of the movie.
For me, of course, the high point of A View to a Kill was the airship (actually a Skyship 600 courtesy of Airship Industries, the former British company now owned by the aptly named Australian, Alan Bond). As I go weak at the knees at the very sight of an airship, as readers of my column will know, any movie that features one automatically has me on its side - even a Roger Moore Bond movie.
I’m sure I’ll be back to normal by the next issue.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I am not certain me and John Brosnan have been watching the same version of A View to a Kill.
Agree with Grace Jones' screen presence. Agree it is too long. Agree with his assessment of Christopher Walken. Disagree with everything else.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 26,584Chief of Staff
John Brosnan starts off with..
“Advance word-of-mouth on this was that it was the worst James Bond yet…”
When usually told a film is horrendous/terrible, it seldom seems to be that bad - you are always looking for some redeeming features…this is possibly what happened with Brosnan here…?
Although A View To A Kill could very well be the worst James Bond film yet…well one of them has to be 🤷🏻♂️🤣
By Bosley Crowther - New York Times 22 December 1965
THUNDERBALL
The popular image of James Bond as the man who has everything, already magnificently developed in three progressively more compelling films, is now being cheerfully expanded beyond any possible chance of doubt in this latest and most handsome screen rendering of an Ian Fleming novel, "Thunderball." Now Mr. Fleming's superhero, still performed by Sean Connery and guided through this adventure by the director of his first two, Terence Young, has not only power over women, miraculous physical reserves, skill in perilous maneuvers and knowledge of all things great and small, but he also has a much better sense of humor than he has shown in his previous films. And this is the secret ingredient that makes "Thunderball" the best of the lot. This time old Double-Oh Seven, which is Mr. Bond's code number in the British intelligence service he so faithfully and tirelessly adorns, is tossing quips faster and better then he did even in "From Russia With Love," and he is viewing his current adventure with more gaiety and aplomb. I think you will, too. In this creation of superman travesty, which arrived yesterday at the reopened Paramount, the Sutton, Cinema II and two score or more other theaters in the metropolitan area. Bond is engaged in discovering who hijacked two nuclear bombs in a NATO aircraft over Europe and is secretly holding them for a ransom of £100 million.That in itself is fairly funny — fanciful and absurd in the same way as are all the problems that require the attention of Bond. But what Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins as the script writers have done is sprinkle their gaudy fabrication with the very best sight and verbal gags."Let my friend sit this one out." Bond asks politely of two disinterested young men as he places his dancing partner in a chair beside them at a table in a nightclub in Nassau. The gentlemen nod permission. "She's just dead," he explains. Or when Bond leaps from a hovering helicopter wearing a skindiver's suit of extraordinary mechanical complexity to engage in an underwater war between SPECTRE and C.I.A. frogmen in the climactic scene of the film, he flips the conclusive comment: "Here comes the kitchen sink!" In addition to being funny, "Thunderball" is pretty, too, and it is filled with such underwater action as would delight Capt. Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The gimmick is that the airplane carrying the hijacked bombs has been ditched, sunk and covered with camouflaging on a coral reef off Nassau. And to get this information and then find and explore the sunken plane. Bond has to do a lot of skindiving, with companions and alone. The amount of underwater equipment the scriptwriters and Mr. Young have provided their athletic actors, including an assortment of beautiful girls in the barest of bare bikinis, is a measure of the splendor of the film. Diving saucers, aqualungs, frogman outfits and a fantastic hydrofoil yacht that belongs to the head man of SPECTRE are devices of daring and fun. So it is in this liveliest extension of the cultural scope of the comic strip. Machinery of the most way-out nature become the instruments and the master, too, of man. "I must be six inches taller," Bond wryly quips at one point after he has been almost shaken to pieces on an electric vibrating machine. The comment is not without significance. This is what machines do to men in these extravagant and tongue-in-cheek Bond pictures. They make distortions of them. Mr. Connery is at his peak of coolness and nonchalance with the girls. Adolfo Celi is piratical as the villain with a black patch over his eye. Claudine Auger, a French beauty winner, is a tasty skindiving dish and Luciana Paluzzi is streamlined as the inevitable and almost insuperable villainous girl.The color is handsome. The scenery in the Bahamas is an irresistible lure. Even the violence is funny. That's the best I can say for a Bond film.
END OF REVIEW
Bosley Crowther is certainly on the ball with Sean being at his peak - no performance before or since by anyone matches this one - Connery IS Bond in TB and no one will change my mind on that one - even though Lazenby’s portrayal is still my favourite (and OHMSS my favourite Bond movie), I recognise the majesty of this performance in the biggest Bond film of all.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Crowther loved Thunderball so much he later named it one of the best films of 1965. By then he was nearing the end of his long career at the New York Times and had become notorious for being old and out-of-touch with contemporary cinema, though his review of TB is an exception.
For a sample of how the alternative press viewed Thunderball, here's a review by the prominent auteurist critic Andrew Sarris. It ran in the Village Voice sometime in 1965-6 and was later collected in his 1973 book The Primal Screen.
Thunderball is less interesting as a film than as a phenomenon. Bing, bing, bing, bing, four Bonds in a row, and each one making more money than its predecessor. There has never been anything quite like it in the commercial history of the motion-picture medium. Pictures have made more money than the Bonds but not on such a steady escalator upward. There was Birth of a Nation, but that was a momentous social and aesthetic event. There were Chaplin, Pickford, Valentino, et al., but they were individual personalities, and there is nothing to indicate that Sean Connery has made it on his own. Marnie and The Hill gained some grosses with his name, but not all that much. It is Connery as Bond and Bond as Connery that is the issue here. Nor can we cite Al Jolson picking up box-office steam with The Singing Fool after The Jazz Singer because the technological revolution of sound was involved there. Nor is it the spy genre. The Bond spoofs and imitations have not done particularly well, and I am willing to bet that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold will turn out to be a box-office disappointment.
There is something here that goes beyond sociological analysis. The Bond movies are a triumph of merchandising and advertising, and even their aesthetic mediocrity works in their financial favor. If any of the Bonds had been particularly good, the others would stand out for their inferiority. It is better for the series that each sequence is consistently inferior. What I find mystifying is that some of the reviewers managed to like Thunderball. Bosley Crowther even put Thunderball on his ten-best list. The humor got to him. Sample Bond humor: Bond shoots a harpoon into someone’s chest and then remarks: “I think he got the point.” And they say What’s New Pussycat? is sick? Some more Bond lines: depositing a dead girl on a night-club table: “Would you mind if she rests here? She’s dead.”
Some of the reviewers chortled over the mink mittens Bond used to stroke a girl’s back. All in all, I counted about eight laughs in the movie and one burst of applause when Bond told the villainess he had derived no pleasure from their sojourn between the sheets. This in no way seems sufficient entertainment for a two-hour-plus movie. Normally, I would predict that the fifth Bond will slip commercially, but I said that about the fourth, and I have been proved wrong. When and where will it all end? Producers Salt [sic] and Broccoli, or whatever their names are, probably figure the Bond craze will go on forever, and maybe they are right.
The pity of it is that Thunderball is a disgrace to a genre I happen to love. I recently saw Fritz Lang’s Spies for the first time and am looking forward to the Modern Museum’s reprise of Hitchcock’s Secret Agent later this month. These are both beautiful, clever, personal works with finesse and feeling, qualities completely lacking in the department-store-dummy world of James Bond. Even the villains have been deteriorating in the series. From Joseph Wiseman in Dr. No to Lotte Lenya and Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love to Gert Frobe and his caddy in Goldfinger we have reached zero in Thunderball with a blackmail plot filched from Fu Manchu and a bevy of undistinguished, indistinguishable bikini models who set a new low for the series. On the plus side, Thunderball is more vicious than Goldfinger, with less of Bond’s castration complex hovering in the background, but Goldfinger had more of an edge with Honor Blackman and Shirley Eaton.
The strangest thing about Thunderball is the inordinate time spent underwater. I haven’t seen so much fishy-eyed footage since World Without Sun. One or two images of fleets of skindivers in mortal combat is about as much phantasmagoria of the future as I care to enjoy. The rest of the time is concerned with how many different ways a man can be made to drown underwater. On this level of audience appreciation, this reviewer is obliged to confess that he is no skindiving enthusiast, either direct or vicarious.
Does the audience like Thunderball? Probably to some extent. After all, even the reviewers like it. I don’t like it, and I don’t recommend it. Like all the Bonds, it is cluttered up with useless gadgets devised for the clumsy adventures of its hero, and Bond is the clumsiest, stupidest detective in all the annals of crime. Next to Bond, Fearless Fosdick is a figure of classical grace and Mike Hammer a mental giant. The Bond films telegraph every last turn of the action so that Bond can always be fifteen minutes ahead of the villains.
Still, the Bonds are not the worst bonanzas I can imagine. There is no cant in them and very little solemnity. There are also random moments of beauty in the orgiastic spectacle of violence and death. Bond obviously derives more ecstasy from strangling a man than embracing a woman, and the plot is only a pretext to conceal the fact that Bond limits his inspired improvisation to killing rather than making love. That is because all women are alike in Bond’s world, but no two murderous antagonists are the same. Yet Bond is not even a convincing killer, and so the audience is let off the hook. If there is one scene that sums up the Bond ethos it is the one in Thunderball where Bond and his girl friend dive deep behind some rocks to make love in full view of the fish. They are out of sight for a moment, and suddenly the water is steaming with air bubbles, and the audience giggles appreciatively at the childishly smutty subterfuge which is both unbelievable and unnecessary besides. It almost makes one miss the hygienic high jinks of Esther Williams.
Bosley Crowther is obviously in touch with the general public - Andrew Sarris is one of those arty-farty snooty critics with a silver spoon stuck up his arse backside.
Thanks for posting @Revelator its always good to read reviews of both sides of the coin.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
A clue to Sarris's attitude toward the Bond films can be seen in the famous Hitchcock/Truffaut book, where Truffaut treats the Bond films as crass rip-offs of Hitchcock, who seems to agree. What made the success of the Bond films even more galling was that around this period Hitchcock went into decline, and his late-period films were primarily championed by auteurist critics like Sarris. You won't be surprised to know that in The Primal Screen Sarris followed his pan of Thunderball with a rave review of Topaze.
Sarris negatively compares Bond to Fritz Lang’s Spies and Hitchcock’s Secret Agent, but at the time of their release those sort of films were also derided as slick, meretricious entertainment with "random moments of beauty in the orgiastic spectacle of violence and death." Whether they were "personal" or not is irrelevant to their quality.
Aside from expressing his distaste for Bond, Sarris only makes a couple of critical points about Thunderball--that its villains aren't as good as the previous ones and that the movie spends too much time underwater--and these points were made elsewhere and in more detail. He claimed the blackmail plot "filched from Fu Manchu"--is that true? Let us know, Sax Rohmer fans! His objections about underwater sex are rather prudish.
Ironically, Sarris's self-doubting prediction that "the fifth Bond will slip commercially" turned out to be true. But his assertion that "if any of the Bonds had been particularly good, the others would stand out for their inferiority" was disproven. As it turned out, the first three films were all good, and the series began slipping afterward.
Further ironies: Sarris later married Molly Haskell, whose rave review of OHMSS appeared in the Village Voice (and is reproduced upthread). And Sarris served long enough as a critic to positively review Daniel Craig's debut as Bond!
New Bond’s Stormy Virility Trumps Connery and Moore
By Andrew Sarris (New York Observer, Nov. 27, 2006).
Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale, from a screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis, based on the novel by Ian Fleming, happens to be the 21st James Bond movie, as well as the very first that I would seriously consider placing on my own yearly 10-best list. Furthermore, I consider Daniel Craig to be the most effective and appealing of the six actors who have played 007, and that includes even Sean Connery [...]
Curiously, that single non-Connery hiatus Bond, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—with the much-underrated George Lazenby as 007 and the exquisite Diana Rigg as the Italian countess he loves, marries and mourns—is actually my second-favorite entry in the series. Certainly Roger Moore was a comparatively lightweight Bond with his seven appearances in the series [...]
Mr. Moore was succeeded, briefly, by Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights (1987) and License to Kill (1989). Actually, Mr. Dalton came the closest to Mr. Craig in projecting stormy virility, and it was rumored that he did most of his own stunts. Still, Mr. Dalton’s vehicles were considered impediments to the flagging but still profitable property. Pierce Brosnan stepped into the breach with Goldeneye (1995), ably directed by Martin Campbell, who was to direct Casino Royale more than a decade later. Indeed, Mr. Brosnan was graced with unusually ambitious directors for his next (and last) three films in the franchise: Roger Spottiswoode’s Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Michael Apted’s The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day (2002).
My recurring problem with Mr. Connery’s Bond vis-à-vis Mr. Craig’s—admittedly in retrospect—is that, though Mr. Connery was the coolest and smoothest of all the Bonds, his coolness and smoothness would curdle over the course of a movie into a smug facetiousness. I must hasten to add that this wasn’t true of most of his non-Bond roles.
Of course, Casino Royale has been adapted from Fleming’s first novel about 007, and so the character can profit from the vulnerability of a novice agent pitted against an ever more evil world. Bond’s relationship with his superior, M (Judi Dench), in London gets off to a rocky start when he blows up an African embassy in Madagascar after a spectacular pursuit of an agile bomb-dealer named Mollaka (Sebastien Foucan). The joke is that the whole city seems to be under construction, enabling Bond and Mollaka to exploit every unfinished construction site and skeletal edifice in their chase. The grim-faced Mr. Craig has already been introduced as a deadpan killer with a sense of humor about his comparatively new vocation, but it is a dry-as-dust humor that he purveys. I must confess that at first I couldn’t tell him apart from the villains in the crowd scenes—and this is good for a supposed undercover agent. As he flits about with seeming effortlessness from Madagascar to the Bahamas to Montenegro to Venice for the movie’s watery climax—part of the franchise’s formula—he never loses control of a character who manages to be stoical and feverish at one and the same time. Even when he is poisoned to within a heartbeat of death, and then later tortured in the most imaginatively painful way, some irreducible part of Mr. Craig’s Bond remains on the alert.
The poisoning occurs during a titanically high-stakes poker game in a Montenegrin gambling casino—a sequence that seems unusually prolonged, possibly to justify the title of the film and its opening playing-card credits. (There are spoilers to follow, so readers of tender sensibility should avert their eyes here.) After the high suspense created by visual cues attesting to the hypnotic power of kings and jacks, Bond finally wins his showdown with the arch villain Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), with a low-black-card straight flush beating Le Chiffre’s high-card full house. It helps that Le Chiffre is afflicted with an ocular problem that causes him to shed tears of blood; it also helps the film that Mr. Mikkelsen is slightly better looking than Mr. Craig, making the battle between good and evil onscreen visually more complex.
From her first briefing of 007, M makes it crystal clear that no ideological issues are involved in Bond’s hunt for arms merchants in the bomb trade; the only motive for Le Chiffre, his cohorts and even his enemies is money. This disclaimer neatly severs Casino Royale from the never-ending war on terror, both here and in Britain, which may be a good thing for the film—Bond is thereby released from getting an uncharacteristically patriotic gleam in his eye as he disposes of his antagonists.
What distinguishes Mr. Craig’s Bond from all the others, except Mr. Lazenby’s, is his expression of both passion and grief after winning and losing Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, who seems for a time to have betrayed him—though, as it turns out, she has saved his life, not once but twice. The relationship begins on the comically sarcastic note that always bodes well for any movie relationship. Vesper displays a flair for the veiled insult, and Bond responds with a faintly amused curiosity. But he has been chastened by a previous affair that has gone badly for the married woman he recklessly bedded. The world he lives in is too dangerous for him to lightly contemplate another romantic adventure, but the rush of violent circumstances drive Vesper and Bond into each other’s arms, where they remain until their prior alliances rise up to engulf them. That Bond so convincingly retains his composure and sang-froid throughout all the horrors that ensue is a testament to Mr. Craig’s abilities as an actor, and to Mr. Campbell’s astuteness as a director.
People might think that my guiding mantra for Casino Royale and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (and most other movies as well) happens to be cherchez la femme. But change that to aimez la femme and I’d plead pleasurably guilty, even as I wholeheartedly recommend Casino Royale as one of the best pictures of the year—not that it will need much help at the box office.
Three very interesting reviews. Too long for me to comment on them at length. I particularly appreciate both reviewers belief Connery is the coolest Bond.
By Bosley Crowther - June 14 1967 - New York Times
Although there's a lot more science-fiction than there is first-vintage James Bond in "You Only Live Twice," the fifth in a series of veritable Bond films with Sean Connery, there's enough of the bright and bland bravado of the popular British super-sleuth mixed into this melee of rocket-launching to make it a bag of good Bond fun. And there's so much of that scientific clatter — so much warring of super-capsules out in space and fussing with electronic gadgets in a great secret underground launching pad—that this wayout adventure picture should be the joy and delight of the youngsters and give pleasure to the reasonable adults who can find release in the majestically absurd.Are your nerves frayed and mind bewildered by the war in the Middle East? Give them a rest via this violent excursion with Double-O Seven in Japan. Go with him on this crucial mission to find out whence come those cannibal capsules that move in to devour those American spaceships that are innocently orbiting the earth, and plunge with him into the strange crater of that dead volcano on the Japanese coast to discover it isn't the Russians who are doing the mischief and save us by a hair's breadth from World War III.You may find the noise slightly deafening when the chasing autos scream around those Tokyo curves, or the four massive enemy helicopters loose their machineguns on the minicopter carrying Bond, or especially when the Japanese commandos rain down upon that secret launching pad and assist Bond in happily blasting this Spectral installation to smithereens.This noisy and wildly violent picture, which opened yesterday at the Astor, the Victoria, the Baronet and Loew's Orpheum, is evidently pegged to the notion that nothing succeeds like excess. And because it is shamelessly excessive, it is about a half-hour too long.Probably its profligate producers. Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, figured they had spent so much on it—on that fantastic launching pad set, which could be put down at Expo 67 and be a hit pavilion; on a sparkling color production and some beautiful location shooting in Japan—that they wanted Lewis Gilbert, the director, to keep it going as long as he could.As a consequence, there is a lengthy build-up of tooling around Tokyo with Bond, buzzing through a wrestling arena, stealing secrets from a chemical company's safe, firming a Japanese contact and trifling casually here and there with a few girls, before it gets to an even lengthier playout of the discovery and raid on the launching pad.Through it all, Mr. Connery paces with his elegant nonchalance a little more non than usual (he is evidently getting slightly bored), but altogether able in the clinches and in tossing off the gags of Roald Dahl. Able as conspirators and scenery are several lovely Japanese girls whose names are so superfluous and difficult there is no point in spelling them out. A fellow named Tetsuro Tamba is dandy as a Japanese partner-spy, and Donald Pleasence is grandly grotesque as the evil genius who would rule the world.It is notable that only Bond, the title and the location of an Ian Fleming book have been used by Mr. Dahl in writing his screenplay. The rest, with, just a Dahl touch here and there, is blueprint Bond stuff cum science-fiction. The sex is minimal. But, then, Bond is getting old. And so, I would guess, is anybody who can't get a few giggles from this film.
END OF REVIEW
Ken Adam’s volcano set is his masterpiece of the whole series - it can only be truly appreciated when seen on a cinema screen.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Review of DR. NO By Bosley Crowther - New York Times - 30 May 1963
IF you haven't yet made the acquaintance of Ian Fleming's suave detective, James Bond, in the author's fertile series of mystery thrillers akin to the yarns of Mickey Spillane, here's your chance to correct that misfortune in one quick and painless stroke. It's by seeing this first motion picture made from a Fleming novel, "Dr. No."This lively, amusing picture, which opened yesterday at the Astor, the Murray Hill and other theaters in the "premiere showcase" group, is not to be taken seriously as realistic fiction or even art, any more than the works of Mr. Fleming are to be taken as long-hair literature. It is strictly a tinseled action-thriller, spiked with a mystery of a sort. And, if you are clever, you will see it as a spoof of science-fiction and sex.For the crime-detecting adventure that Mr. Bond is engaged in here is so wildly exaggerated, so patently contrived, that it is obviously silly and not to be believed. It is a perilous task of discovering who is operating a device on the tropical island of Jamaica that "massively interferes" with the critical rocket launchings from Cape Canaveral.Nonsense, you say. Of course, it's nonsense — pure, escapist bunk, with Bond, an elegant fellow, played by Sean Connery, doing everything (and everybody) that an idle day-dreamer might like to do. Called from a gaming club in London to pick up his orders and his gun and hop on a plane for Jamaica before a tawny temptress leads him astray, old "Double Oh Seven" (that's his code name) is in there being natty from the start. And he keeps on being natty, naughty and nifty to the end.It's not the mystery that entertains you, it's the things that happen along the way—the attempted kidnapping at the Jamaica airport, the tarantula dropped onto Bond's bed, the seduction of the Oriental beauty, the encounter with the beautiful blond bikini-clad Ursula Andress on the beach of Crab Key. And it's all of these things happening so smoothly in the lovely Jamaica locale, looking real and tempting in color, that recommend this playful British film.The ending, which finds Joseph Wiseman being frankly James Masonish in an undersea laboratory that looks like something inspired by Oak Ridge, is a bit too extravagant and silly, and likewise too frantic and long. But something outrageous had to be found with which to end the reckless goings-on.
END OF REVIEW
Americans had to wait about 8 months more than we did in the UK to see the first Bond film - and Bosley Crowther is clearly a bit more impressed than he lets on in this review.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Looking back, it's funny how many of the major critics could only admit to liking the Bond films by treating them as complete jokes. God forbid that I, a serious critic, should heartily recommend a disreputable genre film, but "if you are clever, you will see it as a spoof of science-fiction and sex." And so the critics get to flatter themselves and praise what they would have been otherwise embarassed to rave about. All it took were a few corny one-liners! But decades later the reviews sound weird, because the early Bond films were not complete jokes--at least not in comaparison to the later ones...
Our friendly critic Bosley Crowther now casts his eyes over From Russia With Love, once again having to wait over 6 months from the British release date.
9th April 1964
SECRET AGENT 007 is very much with us again, and anyone who hasn't yet got to know him is urged to do so right away! He is, of course, the snappy fellow who goes by the name of James Bond in Ian Fleming's thrilling novels and is reproduced on the screen by an equally snappy actor by the name of Sean Connery. His reappearance in this instance is in the second delightfully wild film made from a Fleming novel, "From Russia With Love."Don't miss it! This is to say, don't miss it if you can still get the least bit of fun out of lurid adventure fiction and pseudo-realistic fantasy. For this mad melodramatization of a desperate adventure of Bond with sinister characters in Istanbul and on the Orient Express is fictional exaggeration on a grand scale and in a dashing style, thoroughly illogical and improbable, but with tongue blithely wedged in cheek. Again good old "Double Oh Seven" is sent by his London chief, "M," to look into a promised opportunity to tweak the hide of the Russians in the Near East. It seems there's a secret mechanism called a Lektor that may be filched from the Soviet Embassy in Turkey, if the cards — and the cads — are smartly played. This means the agent who does it must work in consort with a beautiful girl and a Turkish voluptuary, which is right down old "Double Oh Seven's" street. Of course, he doesn't know the whole set-up is a diabolical plant of that international apparatus, Spectre, aimed to snag Lektor for itself and also to place its favorite nemesis in the gravest jeopardy. And he doesn't sense that the strange and solemn fellow who tails him all over the place is a homicidal paranoiac ("the best kind") working for Spectre, until almost too late. Well, there's no point in trying to tell you all the mad, naughty things that take place — the meetings with mysterious people, the encounters with beautiful girls, the bomb explosions, the chases, the violent encounter of Bond with a helicopter, a motor boat race. Nor is there any point in trying to locate the various characters in the plot, all of whom are deliciously fantastic and delightfully well played. There's Lotte Lenya as an arch Spectre agent, Robert Shaw as the paranoiac, Pedro Armendariz as the jovial Turkish contact and Daniela Bianchi as the beautiful girl. And, oh, how beautiful, luscious and voluptuous she is! Even old "Double Oh Seven" cannot resist her, and takes her home at the end. Terence Young has directed the whole thing grandly, with some color photography of Istanbul and surrounding country that gives it the proper key. Don't ask any more. Just go to see it and have yourself a good time. It is at the Astor and other "showcase" theaters.
END OF REVIEW
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
After what was announced as Sean Connery’s positively last appearance as Bond (in You Only Live Twice), we had George Lazenby making what proved to be his last appearance as anyone in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Whatever the cause, and it is reasonable to suppose that money had something to do with it, Connery then changed his mind and may now be seen easing his way through and into the machinery of Diamonds are Forever, hand as steady as ever on glass, steering wheel or lady, mouth occasionally crinkling to emit an innuendo. The new Bond, the seventh if we ignore the aberrant Casino Royale, lets one down sadly in the pre-credit sequence – the particularly stunning openers still belong to From Russia With Love and Goldfinger – which here has some unclear and messy business relating to mud baths and plastic surgery. Thereafter, things pick up and Bond is soon on his way to look int a diamond smuggling racket. From Amsterdam and an encounter with toothsome Tiffany Case (Jill St John) as well as a fight to the death in a lift-shaft, Bond wings into Los Angeles with a coffin and narrowly avoids incineration in a Las Vegas mortuary. Two camp villains crop up all over and one of the more genial moments finds them gazing raptly as an exploding helicopter before wandering off into the desert hand-in-hand.
Blofeld, of course, is at the back of it all, previously incarnated by Donald Pleasance and Telly Savalas but here done to a turn by Charles Gray. Once again, he’s intent on bringing the world powers to their knees and all those diamonds are needed for a lethal kind of reflector satellite. No matter, the unpursuable plot gives Bond a chance to break out of a clandestine research centre, careering over hill and dale in a lunar vehicle, and, later, to indulge in the greatest car chase in living memory, with police automobiles banging into one another like drunks at a wake and James speeding to safety through a narrow alley on two wheels. Bon Simmons and Paul Baxley are listed as stunt arrangers and probably deserve equal billing with ken Adam, whose sets are well up to par, and Mr Connery. Two athletic musclewomen, Bambi and Thumpe, add to the gaiety and one was glad to see Q (Desmond Llewelwyn) coming up to scratch with peel-off false fingerprints and a jackpot winning way with rows of one-armed bandits. Events culminating in a seaborne blowup go on too lomng, but the queer couple make a last minute assault that Bond foils by a nice combination of winemanship and brute force. Guy Hamilton directed.
Diamonds Are Forever starts with a full head of steam, and one expects a luxuriant, mock-sadistic good time. But a few minutes later Sean Connery, as Bond, and a villain are in a tiny elevator, lunging at each other and pounding at each other with excruciatingly amplified blows; the sequence goes on and on, and the movie loses its insolent cool. The Bond pictures depend on the comic pornography of brutality; the violence has to be witty. When people are just slugging each other, as in any movie fight, the point of the picture is blunted. This movie never recovers for long.
The script (by Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz) involves diamond smuggling and old Blofeld; it's a wilted affair with deep-in-the-closet bitch-fag villains. The one new character with possibilities, a billionaire Las Vegas recluse modelled on Howard Hughes, is dimly written, and played—shall we say rustically?—by Jimmy Dean. (He acts as if someone had just suggested to him that he turn actor but hadn’t told him how.) The picture isn’t bad; it’s merely tired, and it’s often noisy when it means to be exciting.
Guy Hamilton directs more or less adequately, but he isn’t precise enough for nonchalance—for the right, perfectly careless throwaway-joke tone. Hamilton doesn't parody urbanity and flippancy, because he’s still struggling to achieve them. The Ken Adam sets just sit there, and the film doesn’t have anything like those flamboyant sequences in the snow—the ski chase and the bobsled run—that were quite literally dazzling in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
What's missing may be linked to the absence of Peter Hunt, who worked on the action sequences of all the earlier Bonds, and who directed the last one; perhaps it was he who gave the series its distinctive quality of aestheticized thrills. The daring seemed beautiful in the earlier films—precariously glorified. This time, even when a sequence works (that is, both daring and funny) such as the car chase, and the battle between Connery and the black and white Amazons, it lacks elegance and visual opulence; it looks like sequences of the same kind in Bond imitations. No doubt those of us who love the Bond pictures are spoiled, but really we’ve come to expect more than a comic car chase.
Customers may, however, be happy enough with what they get. Diamonds Are Forever has opened just at the moment when people long for the familiar, stable, unalienated hero with a capacity for enjoyment; the timing could not be better for Sean Connery to come back as Bond. He no longer wears the waxy deadpan of a sex-fantasy stud dummy; over the years he has turned the robot-matinee-idol Bond into a man—himself. The foppery and gadgetry have diminished, and the sexual conquests, too. Almost imperceptively, Bond has lost his upper-class snobbery along with the toiletries; it’s as if that snotty, enigmatic Bond disgusted Connery. His instinct was right: it’s better this way, because Connery’s mock-heroic presence incarnates the appeal of the series without need of the commodity accoutrements of a modern pasha—without need even of a harem. Bond doesn’t seem a phony anymore.
Note: Peter Hunt remarked in an interview: "Broccoli asked me to come back for Diamonds Are Forever, but at that time he and Saltzman were fighting and I was involved with something else. I told them that if they moved the production date I might be able to, but they couldn't and so they went with Guy Hamilton. I did, however, get a beautiful review from Pauline Kael on that, who said, 'The one thing missing from this film is Peter Hunt' (laughs)."
Kael's review is better than Coleman's. As pointed out above, she offers an opinion of the film which barely passes Coleman's pen he's so busy reminding us what came before and what we might see. Her assessment is quite astute, I think, and I am glad she liked Connery's laid back, more mature Bond. I disagree that the violence is misplaced and I also find DAF quite hilarious. Perhaps Pauline had a sense of humour failure once the fists started to fly...
I’m no fan of Pauline Kael’s reviews but she did hit the nail on the head when stating that the Peter Hunt influence was badly missing - in fact the series never really recovered without him and took off in a different direction.
Here’s the DAF review from the NYT
By Peter Schjeld - December 26 1971
IAN FLEMING was one of John F. Kennedy's favorite authors, and, when you think about it, the JFK years were often a lot like Ian Fleming's novels, with sexy personalities, amazing technologies and an atmosphere of constant, cosmic peril. Remember the Missile Gap, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Green Berets, crash funding for NASA, Red aggression in Vietnam? It was great theater, involving vast expenditures of money and adrenalin, and a national audience teetered between exhilaration and panic. It was also about that time that two bright men named Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli cashed in on this audience's hunger for more of the same by commencing to produce James Bond movies.
It all seems a long time ago, and it has been. It has even been a long time since the last Bond movie starring Sean Connery, “You Only Live Twice” (an interim attempt to go it without Connery, “In Her Majesty's Secret Service,” went ker‐plop); it has been four years, which is long enough for the whole world to have changed once or twice. But here he is again, Connery as Bond in a Saltzman‐Broccoli megaproduction directed by Guy (“Goldfinger”) Hamilton, “Diamonds Are Forever,” and folks are lining up in subfreezing temperatures at theaters all over town to see it. The fellow behind me on line at the Waverly confided to a companion that this would be only the second movie he had seen in three years.
“Diamonds Are Forever” stands to make about a zillion dollars, and nostalgia of an especially piercing sort will have a lot to do with it. Simply, the Bond brand of escapist fantasy—to a world where the two eternal verities are money and power and the two foregone conclusions are violence and sex —scratches an itch, and it's an itch that nothing else in the emotionally torpid Nixon era can reach as directly. Bond is as authentic an article of the sixties as Fred Astaire was of the thirties, and the issue of “quality” hardly seems germane. I don't imagine many of the thousands of people who’ rushed to see “Diamonds Are Forever” when it opened paused en route to check the reviews. They just rushed.
It is, as it happens, a pretty good movie—not great art, but fantastic packaging. The best (or, anyway, the best worst) of the classic formulae—notably, gimmickry and exoticism a go go—have been retained, some up‐dating elements have been added and other elements have been fudged. For instance, all the old folderol about guns is played down; in place of his former phallic cannon, Bond now packs a modest little automatic and, as I recall, never does shoot anybody with it—though naturally he is called on now and then to dispatch a baddy, usually in a bizarre manner. In general, the tone of Connery's Bond has gotten mellower, like a train whistle demonstrating the Doppler Effect. And, indeed, the softening of the Bond image undoubtedly is the effect of a kind of recession in time, as its supporting myths (the Cold War, for example) are gradually out‐distanced by history.
Not that Bond is in any imminent danger of becoming a mere friendly ghost of his former self. A rat‐a‐tat pre‐credit sequence, showing him being passably vicious with a series of people from whom he wants information, makes sure we are aware Df that. One in the series is a bikinied beauty. “There's something I want you to get off your chest,” he says, snatching the bra and twisting it around her throat. Of course, if Bond ever actually ceased to be a sexist bully, and if the type of his wit were really refined (say, from sledge hammer to ball peen), he would simply no longer be Bond, and it would be all over. As it is, he beds only one woman in this movie (Jill St. John, so you know his taste hasn't. failed him), and I suspect that's a record.
The cutest of several new wrinkles in “Diamonds Are Forever” is a winsome pair of homosexual killers (Bruce Cabot and Bruce Glover), so charming they practically steal the show. They would, moreover, be worth mentioning if only as an instance of the cunning with which script‐writers Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz (what the film has in common with Fleming's novel, a friend tells me, is mainly its title) wire their inventions into the Bond audience's stock‐reaction centers. For these fey killers are, by all odds, the least sinister villains in any Bond movie, and one can only conclude that their seaminess (earning them one of the most atrocious ends in movie history) is to be inferred from the fact that they are homosexual. Not that I'm really objecting. In such an engine of total fantasy manipulation as “Diamonds Are Forever,” the anti‐gay element is just another little sprocket.
There doesn't seem to he much point in going into the plot, which as usual develops fast at the start and at the end, is mostly picaresque in the middle and begins to go wobbly under the weight of its accumulated preposterousness at about the point where the middle and end overlap. The emotional climax, for me, was a stupendously funny and exciting car chase about halfway through, a sort of mechanical ballet celebrating the destructibility of American sedans. This seems to have been it for the rest of the audience, too; mostly youthful, they had been whooping it up in the early going but sank into listless silence later, not to be stirred even by the crash‐boom of the obligatory closing fire fight (on an oil rig in the Pacific this time).
A new James Bond movie, if you love movies, may be a bit like a Superbowl game between two teams you hate, if you love football. You watch it with plenty of misgivings, but how can you not watch it? It is a kind of national rite. Moreover, it is an occasion that can remind you of what the movie business used to be like in America; for a moment it reconvenes the great mass audience long since lost to television hack before the silver screen. Assuming you cherish few illusions about the perfectibility of human moral attitudes, how can that be bad—especially when what the people are watching has class? And “Diamonds Are Forever,” the richest and ripest of the Bond flicks, has class, and that's good.
END OF REVIEW
It seems that it doesn’t matter who does the Bond reviews in the NYT they all seem to say it’s not great art but it is great fun - what else does a Bond fan want? (I know, I know, a new film every two years is what we do want!)
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
A bare fact must be faced. The superheated screen activities of Ian Fleming's supersleuth and sex symbol, James Bond, are as inevitable as sex or crime or On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the sixth steaming annal in the sock 'em and spoof 'em spy series that crashed into the DeMille and other local theaters yesterday.
Serious criticism of such an esteemed institution would be tantamount to throwing rocks at Buckingham Palace, but it does call for a handful of pebbles. Devotees will note that Sean Connery, the virile, suave conqueror of all those dastards and dames in the five previous capers, has given up his 007 Bond credentials to George Lazenby, a 30-year-old Australian newcomer to films. He's tall, dark, handsome and has a dimpled chin. But Mr. Lazenby, if not a spurious Bond, is merely a casual, pleasant, satisfactory replacement.
For the record, he plays a decidedly second fiddle to an overabundance of continuous action, a soundtrack as explosive as the London Blitz, and flip dialogue and characterizations set against some authentic, truly spectacular Portuguese and Swiss scenic backgrounds, caught in eyecatching colors.
What are Bond's problems now? They're too numerous, as usual, to hold the constant attention of anyone other than a charter member of Her Majesty's Secret Service. What sets our bully boy off and fighting, running, shooting and loving this time is a lissome, leggy lass mysteriously bent on drowning herself in the waves thunderously crashing on a lonely Portuguese beach.
First thing you know he's involved in a battle with two toughs that is as full of karate chops and belts in the belly as a brawl in a Singapore alley. To the credit of Richard Maibaum, the scenarist, the film's tongue-in-cheek attitude is set right at the outset. Once our new Bond emerges triumphant, he turns to the audience and says, somewhat plaintively: 'This never happened to the other fellow.'
But it does. The lady of his life, the svelte Diana Rigg, who learned her karate chops from the British TV 'Avenger' series, is the daughter of the blandly effete Gabriele Ferzetti, Mafioso-like tycoon, who likes Bond and wants to destroy that Spectre chief, Telly Savalas, his competition in world crime. That suits Bond too, and practically right off he's in Switzerland, where our villain maintains an eyrie atop an Alp.
It's an inaccessible retreat, supposedly an institute for allergy research complete with hired guns, scientific gimmicks and an international conclave of allegedly allergic beauties who are really being brainwashed by the oily, bald-domed Mr. Savalas to spread his biological destruction of the world's food supply. Get it?
Bond dallies with the dolls, of course, but the heart of the matter is a series of chases shot by the 41-year-old Peter Hunt, second unit director of the previous adventures, who's making his directorial debut with this one. The chases are breakneck, devastating affairs.
A viewer must remember what seems to be the longest ski chase and bobsled run ever, full of gunfire and spills, that even includes an avalanche. There also is a decibel-filled fight amid clanging Swiss cow bells, the jarring bombing of that eyrie by helicopter-borne rescuers and the inadvertent clashes of the escaping Bond and Miss Rigg in a slithering, bang-up stock car race. One must say amen to a colleague's observation: "I never expected to see Switzerland defoliated like 'this.'
It should be reported that the producers and distributors already have rung up a reported $82,200,000 on their first five Bond issues. It is not ungallant to report that Bond marries Miss Rigg, who is gunned down and killed by Savalas on their honeymoon. So it is reasonable to expect that Bond inevitably will be loving, shooting and running again.
Peter Schjeld writes about DAF how I have felt going to watch SF, SP and NTTD. I miss the joy:
A new James Bond movie, if you love movies, may be a bit like a Superbowl game between two teams you hate, if you love football. You watch it with plenty of misgivings, but how can you not watch it? It is a kind of national rite.
My impression is that critics of that era didn't really care about spoilers, despite (or because of?) the fact that movies ran much longer in theaters back then. Interesting that the NYT reviewer for DAF claims that OHMSS "went ker‐plop" when it clearly didn't--the film was neither a financial or critical flop. But the minute Connery returned to the role, Lazenby was regarded as a failure, and that impression extended to his film, until it became more accessible on home video.
but it was only a few years earlier Hitchcocks ad campaign for Psycho was centred round his personal demand to not give away the shock ending. that was a popular movie, youd think the No Spoilers philosophy would've caught on
Review of LALD by Vincent Canby in the NYT 15th July 1973.
In “Live and Let Die,” the James Bond novel that Tom Mankiewicz has had the good sense to rewrite almost completely for the screen, the late Ian Fleming introduces Mr. Big, the villain of the piece, in exposition presented in the form of the following dialogue:
“'I don't think I've ever heard of a great Negro criminal before,’ said Bond. ‘Chinamen, of course. the men behind the opium trade. There've been some big‐time Japs, mostly in pearls and drugs. Plenty of Negroes mixed up in diamonds and gold in Africa, but always in a small way. They don't seem to take to big business. Pretty law‐abiding chaps, on the whole, should have thought.’
“'Our man's a bit of an excetption.’ said M. ‘He's not pure Negro. Born in Haiti, Good dose of French blood. Trained in Moscow, too, as you'll see from the file. And the Negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions—scienlists, doctors, writers. It's about time they turned out a criminal. ’ “
“Live and Let Die,” which was published in 1954, is filled with casual prejudices that today seem dumbfounding, especially that reference to Mr. Big's being a bit of an exception because he's not pure Negro. Mr. Big, says Fleming, has an advantage over most Negroes because he possesses a good dose of French blood and was trained in Moscow, presumably (I think that Fleming would have thought) the same Moscow that would have embraced a man on the order of Paul Robeson. Even Fleming’s use of the word “dose” to describe French ancestry says something about what the English novelist fears about the free‐loving French.
Live and Let Die,” the novel, is a true period piece, though not necessarily of the 1950's. Its snobberies are turn‐of‐the‐century while its plot—some nonsense about. buried Jamaican pirate treasure that's being used to finance Soviet espionage activities in the United States —goes back even further, to Robert Louis Stevenson, desperately updated.
James Bond, the movie rather than novel hero, was first acted by Sean Connery and has been taken over by Roger Moore in “Live and Let Die” with no visible ill effects, is still very much a figure of the more conservative 1960's when “Dr. No,” the initial film in the Bond series, was released. He's a natty though hardly a mod dresser. His haircut couldn't possibly have offended the late J. Edgar Hoover and his language is remarkably free of the sort of expletives that aren't allowed on prime‐time.
Yet, in several ways, “Live and Let Die” is more liberated, more uninhibited, less uptight than any number of contemporary fantasy‐feeding black films like “The Mack” and “Cleopatra Jones.”
Tom Mankiewicz, who wrote the screenplay and virtually a whole new plot for “Live and Let Die,” Guy Hamilton, who directed the film, and Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, who produced it (as they did seven of the eight earlier Bond films), have created a most unusual entertainment. “Live and Let Die” is certainly not a black film - though it is black‐oriented in a way that no earlier Bond film was—and it must be labeled more or less right‐wing, if only because it doesn't have any easily identifiable political or social concerns in its head. I say this perfectly aware that in Mankiewicz's new plot Bond's mission is to destroy a huge heroin‐smuggling operation, based not on Jamaica (though the film was partially photographed there) but on a fictitious Caribbean island named San Monique. However, Bond carries out his duties as unencumbered by ideology as a plumber. It's his job and he does it for the good life it affords him. Similarly, the villains in the film, all of whom are black, are motivated principally by personal gain.
This may not be a surprising virtue to find in a film as earnestly dedicated to the pleasure principle as “Live and Let Die,” but it's a refreshing change from most black exploitation films, which tend to be sensational garbage wrapped in piety, and from white “message” films, which tend to be pious garbage wrapped in sensation.
Even though its gags and one liners (especially those having to do with Bond's prodigious sexual prowess) are stunningly obvious (but sometimes funny, in the way familiar old vaudeville routines are funny), the film's point of view is so civilized that it renders most prejudices ridiculous by royally ingoring them.
It appreciates the style, wit and cleverness of Mr. Big (Yaphet Kotto), though it never patronizes him. Black and white are equally matched throughout the film (even in the credits, which, if I remember correctly, divide their attention between a beautiful white dancer and a beautiful black dancer), but the purpose of the film is not to promote equality. The film simply reflects it as if there were no question about the matter. This, too, is fantasy, perhaps, but it seems to me to be a lot healthier than fantasies about black or white supercats who pretend to be socially conscious.
Just how civilized the film is, I think, is reflected in the fact that it is able to exploit, in a single coherent narrative, sinister Caribbean voodoo rites, a crooked black island dictator, a sense of real black brotherhood, the supremacy of James Bond at almost everything, and a redneck Louisiana sheriff who, as played by Clifton James, becomes one of the funniest characters you'll probably see on screen all year.
This last I find particularly startling, for it wasn't very long ago (say as long ago as “Easy Rider”) that this character was a figure of almost mythical dread. He couldn't be treated comically. Our liberal sentiments wouldn't allow it. Today he can be. And we can have a black villain matching wits against a white hero without immediately seeing it in terms of a social or political confrontation.
In its odd, off‐hand sort of way, “Live and Let Die” turns old stereotypes inside out.
However, I don't want to put you off “Live and Let Die” by overstressing its social importance. It's pop entertainment, carefully calculated to amuse as many people as possible, black as well as white, and thus to make fortunes for everyone connected with it. It thus honorably carries on the tradition established in the earlier Bond films (on two of which, “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever,” Hamilton and Mankiewicz have also collaborated successfully). The titles, plots and gadgets are now beginning to run together, but the intelligence of the series remains highly distinctive.
END OF REVIEW
I think this is a decent review of the then current situation of blaxploitation films and how LALD transcends the genre - and of course, the final paragraph which praises the film and the series as a whole.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Comments
A VIEW TO A KILL by John Brosnan from Starburst #85
Advance word-of-mouth on this was that it was the worst James Bond yet, so I went to the screening prepared to suffer. Imagine my astonishment when I discovered that it wasn’t half as bad as I expected. On the contrary, it ranks as probably the best Roger Moore/Broccoli Bond movie since The Spy who Loved Me. It may be just another sign of my brain softening due to advancing old age, but I even found Moore himself quite bearable in the role this time round. And despite his 57 years he looked younger and fitter than he did in Octopussy. Does this mean I’ve cracked up completely?
Not that I don’t have criticisms of the movie. As usual it’s too long. At least 20 minutes could have been lopped from its 2 hour 11 minute running time, and there are several sequences that slow the film down to a dead-stop (for example, the sequence involving Fiona Fullerton’s Russian agent). As usual, again. I found the sexual double entendres embarrassingly old fashioned and unamusing, with the exception of the one quipped by Bond (and no doubt ad-libbed by Moore) during the fire-engine chase sequence through San Francisco (as this is a family magazine I shall not elaborate).
But the reason - or one of them - why A View to a Kill works better than the last few Bonds is that the makers have returned to old formula of featuring a super-villain with an over-the-top villainous scheme. In this case it’s a reworking of the plot of Goldfinger with the villain. Max Zorin (Christopher Walken, in a variable performance) planning to destroy California’s micro-chip industries in order to increase the value of his own electronics empire, just as Goldfinger tried to increase the value of his gold stocks by destroying Fort Knox.
Another asset to the movie is Grace Jones as Zorin’s henchwoman May Day. She may not be a great actress, but she has a terrific screen presence, which is well exploited on this occasion. She also has an impressive death scene, going out with a bang reminiscent of Cagey’s explosive climax in White Heat.
Unfortunately. however, the expected fight scene between her and Bond never occurs, which rather lets down the film’s publicity campaign (“Has James Bond Finally Met His match?’’), which suggests that such a confrontation will be the high point of the movie.
For me, of course, the high point of A View to a Kill was the airship (actually a Skyship 600 courtesy of Airship Industries, the former British company now owned by the aptly named Australian, Alan Bond). As I go weak at the knees at the very sight of an airship, as readers of my column will know, any movie that features one automatically has me on its side - even a Roger Moore Bond movie.
I’m sure I’ll be back to normal by the next issue.
I am not certain me and John Brosnan have been watching the same version of A View to a Kill.
Agree with Grace Jones' screen presence. Agree it is too long. Agree with his assessment of Christopher Walken. Disagree with everything else.
John Brosnan starts off with..
“Advance word-of-mouth on this was that it was the worst James Bond yet…”
When usually told a film is horrendous/terrible, it seldom seems to be that bad - you are always looking for some redeeming features…this is possibly what happened with Brosnan here…?
Although A View To A Kill could very well be the worst James Bond film yet…well one of them has to be 🤷🏻♂️🤣
There is some truth in his review though 😏
By Bosley Crowther - New York Times 22 December 1965
THUNDERBALL
The popular image of James Bond as the man who has everything, already magnificently developed in three progressively more compelling films, is now being cheerfully expanded beyond any possible chance of doubt in this latest and most handsome screen rendering of an Ian Fleming novel, "Thunderball." Now Mr. Fleming's superhero, still performed by Sean Connery and guided through this adventure by the director of his first two, Terence Young, has not only power over women, miraculous physical reserves, skill in perilous maneuvers and knowledge of all things great and small, but he also has a much better sense of humor than he has shown in his previous films. And this is the secret ingredient that makes "Thunderball" the best of the lot. This time old Double-Oh Seven, which is Mr. Bond's code number in the British intelligence service he so faithfully and tirelessly adorns, is tossing quips faster and better then he did even in "From Russia With Love," and he is viewing his current adventure with more gaiety and aplomb. I think you will, too. In this creation of superman travesty, which arrived yesterday at the reopened Paramount, the Sutton, Cinema II and two score or more other theaters in the metropolitan area. Bond is engaged in discovering who hijacked two nuclear bombs in a NATO aircraft over Europe and is secretly holding them for a ransom of £100 million.That in itself is fairly funny — fanciful and absurd in the same way as are all the problems that require the attention of Bond. But what Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins as the script writers have done is sprinkle their gaudy fabrication with the very best sight and verbal gags."Let my friend sit this one out." Bond asks politely of two disinterested young men as he places his dancing partner in a chair beside them at a table in a nightclub in Nassau. The gentlemen nod permission. "She's just dead," he explains. Or when Bond leaps from a hovering helicopter wearing a skindiver's suit of extraordinary mechanical complexity to engage in an underwater war between SPECTRE and C.I.A. frogmen in the climactic scene of the film, he flips the conclusive comment: "Here comes the kitchen sink!" In addition to being funny, "Thunderball" is pretty, too, and it is filled with such underwater action as would delight Capt. Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The gimmick is that the airplane carrying the hijacked bombs has been ditched, sunk and covered with camouflaging on a coral reef off Nassau. And to get this information and then find and explore the sunken plane. Bond has to do a lot of skindiving, with companions and alone. The amount of underwater equipment the scriptwriters and Mr. Young have provided their athletic actors, including an assortment of beautiful girls in the barest of bare bikinis, is a measure of the splendor of the film. Diving saucers, aqualungs, frogman outfits and a fantastic hydrofoil yacht that belongs to the head man of SPECTRE are devices of daring and fun. So it is in this liveliest extension of the cultural scope of the comic strip. Machinery of the most way-out nature become the instruments and the master, too, of man. "I must be six inches taller," Bond wryly quips at one point after he has been almost shaken to pieces on an electric vibrating machine. The comment is not without significance. This is what machines do to men in these extravagant and tongue-in-cheek Bond pictures. They make distortions of them. Mr. Connery is at his peak of coolness and nonchalance with the girls. Adolfo Celi is piratical as the villain with a black patch over his eye. Claudine Auger, a French beauty winner, is a tasty skindiving dish and Luciana Paluzzi is streamlined as the inevitable and almost insuperable villainous girl.The color is handsome. The scenery in the Bahamas is an irresistible lure. Even the violence is funny. That's the best I can say for a Bond film.
END OF REVIEW
Bosley Crowther is certainly on the ball with Sean being at his peak - no performance before or since by anyone matches this one - Connery IS Bond in TB and no one will change my mind on that one - even though Lazenby’s portrayal is still my favourite (and OHMSS my favourite Bond movie), I recognise the majesty of this performance in the biggest Bond film of all.
Crowther loved Thunderball so much he later named it one of the best films of 1965. By then he was nearing the end of his long career at the New York Times and had become notorious for being old and out-of-touch with contemporary cinema, though his review of TB is an exception.
For a sample of how the alternative press viewed Thunderball, here's a review by the prominent auteurist critic Andrew Sarris. It ran in the Village Voice sometime in 1965-6 and was later collected in his 1973 book The Primal Screen.
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Thunderball is less interesting as a film than as a phenomenon. Bing, bing, bing, bing, four Bonds in a row, and each one making more money than its predecessor. There has never been anything quite like it in the commercial history of the motion-picture medium. Pictures have made more money than the Bonds but not on such a steady escalator upward. There was Birth of a Nation, but that was a momentous social and aesthetic event. There were Chaplin, Pickford, Valentino, et al., but they were individual personalities, and there is nothing to indicate that Sean Connery has made it on his own. Marnie and The Hill gained some grosses with his name, but not all that much. It is Connery as Bond and Bond as Connery that is the issue here. Nor can we cite Al Jolson picking up box-office steam with The Singing Fool after The Jazz Singer because the technological revolution of sound was involved there. Nor is it the spy genre. The Bond spoofs and imitations have not done particularly well, and I am willing to bet that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold will turn out to be a box-office disappointment.
There is something here that goes beyond sociological analysis. The Bond movies are a triumph of merchandising and advertising, and even their aesthetic mediocrity works in their financial favor. If any of the Bonds had been particularly good, the others would stand out for their inferiority. It is better for the series that each sequence is consistently inferior. What I find mystifying is that some of the reviewers managed to like Thunderball. Bosley Crowther even put Thunderball on his ten-best list. The humor got to him. Sample Bond humor: Bond shoots a harpoon into someone’s chest and then remarks: “I think he got the point.” And they say What’s New Pussycat? is sick? Some more Bond lines: depositing a dead girl on a night-club table: “Would you mind if she rests here? She’s dead.”
Some of the reviewers chortled over the mink mittens Bond used to stroke a girl’s back. All in all, I counted about eight laughs in the movie and one burst of applause when Bond told the villainess he had derived no pleasure from their sojourn between the sheets. This in no way seems sufficient entertainment for a two-hour-plus movie. Normally, I would predict that the fifth Bond will slip commercially, but I said that about the fourth, and I have been proved wrong. When and where will it all end? Producers Salt [sic] and Broccoli, or whatever their names are, probably figure the Bond craze will go on forever, and maybe they are right.
The pity of it is that Thunderball is a disgrace to a genre I happen to love. I recently saw Fritz Lang’s Spies for the first time and am looking forward to the Modern Museum’s reprise of Hitchcock’s Secret Agent later this month. These are both beautiful, clever, personal works with finesse and feeling, qualities completely lacking in the department-store-dummy world of James Bond. Even the villains have been deteriorating in the series. From Joseph Wiseman in Dr. No to Lotte Lenya and Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love to Gert Frobe and his caddy in Goldfinger we have reached zero in Thunderball with a blackmail plot filched from Fu Manchu and a bevy of undistinguished, indistinguishable bikini models who set a new low for the series. On the plus side, Thunderball is more vicious than Goldfinger, with less of Bond’s castration complex hovering in the background, but Goldfinger had more of an edge with Honor Blackman and Shirley Eaton.
The strangest thing about Thunderball is the inordinate time spent underwater. I haven’t seen so much fishy-eyed footage since World Without Sun. One or two images of fleets of skindivers in mortal combat is about as much phantasmagoria of the future as I care to enjoy. The rest of the time is concerned with how many different ways a man can be made to drown underwater. On this level of audience appreciation, this reviewer is obliged to confess that he is no skindiving enthusiast, either direct or vicarious.
Does the audience like Thunderball? Probably to some extent. After all, even the reviewers like it. I don’t like it, and I don’t recommend it. Like all the Bonds, it is cluttered up with useless gadgets devised for the clumsy adventures of its hero, and Bond is the clumsiest, stupidest detective in all the annals of crime. Next to Bond, Fearless Fosdick is a figure of classical grace and Mike Hammer a mental giant. The Bond films telegraph every last turn of the action so that Bond can always be fifteen minutes ahead of the villains.
Still, the Bonds are not the worst bonanzas I can imagine. There is no cant in them and very little solemnity. There are also random moments of beauty in the orgiastic spectacle of violence and death. Bond obviously derives more ecstasy from strangling a man than embracing a woman, and the plot is only a pretext to conceal the fact that Bond limits his inspired improvisation to killing rather than making love. That is because all women are alike in Bond’s world, but no two murderous antagonists are the same. Yet Bond is not even a convincing killer, and so the audience is let off the hook. If there is one scene that sums up the Bond ethos it is the one in Thunderball where Bond and his girl friend dive deep behind some rocks to make love in full view of the fish. They are out of sight for a moment, and suddenly the water is steaming with air bubbles, and the audience giggles appreciatively at the childishly smutty subterfuge which is both unbelievable and unnecessary besides. It almost makes one miss the hygienic high jinks of Esther Williams.
I'm with the happy Crowther (and obviously CHB) rather than the grouchy Sarris.
Connery would go to make it on his own, contrary to what Sarris said, but granted it did take him some time.
Bosley Crowther is obviously in touch with the general public - Andrew Sarris is one of those arty-farty snooty critics with a silver spoon stuck up his
arsebackside.Thanks for posting @Revelator its always good to read reviews of both sides of the coin.
A clue to Sarris's attitude toward the Bond films can be seen in the famous Hitchcock/Truffaut book, where Truffaut treats the Bond films as crass rip-offs of Hitchcock, who seems to agree. What made the success of the Bond films even more galling was that around this period Hitchcock went into decline, and his late-period films were primarily championed by auteurist critics like Sarris. You won't be surprised to know that in The Primal Screen Sarris followed his pan of Thunderball with a rave review of Topaze.
Sarris negatively compares Bond to Fritz Lang’s Spies and Hitchcock’s Secret Agent, but at the time of their release those sort of films were also derided as slick, meretricious entertainment with "random moments of beauty in the orgiastic spectacle of violence and death." Whether they were "personal" or not is irrelevant to their quality.
Aside from expressing his distaste for Bond, Sarris only makes a couple of critical points about Thunderball--that its villains aren't as good as the previous ones and that the movie spends too much time underwater--and these points were made elsewhere and in more detail. He claimed the blackmail plot "filched from Fu Manchu"--is that true? Let us know, Sax Rohmer fans! His objections about underwater sex are rather prudish.
Ironically, Sarris's self-doubting prediction that "the fifth Bond will slip commercially" turned out to be true. But his assertion that "if any of the Bonds had been particularly good, the others would stand out for their inferiority" was disproven. As it turned out, the first three films were all good, and the series began slipping afterward.
Further ironies: Sarris later married Molly Haskell, whose rave review of OHMSS appeared in the Village Voice (and is reproduced upthread). And Sarris served long enough as a critic to positively review Daniel Craig's debut as Bond!
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New Bond’s Stormy Virility Trumps Connery and Moore
By Andrew Sarris (New York Observer, Nov. 27, 2006).
Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale, from a screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis, based on the novel by Ian Fleming, happens to be the 21st James Bond movie, as well as the very first that I would seriously consider placing on my own yearly 10-best list. Furthermore, I consider Daniel Craig to be the most effective and appealing of the six actors who have played 007, and that includes even Sean Connery [...]
Curiously, that single non-Connery hiatus Bond, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—with the much-underrated George Lazenby as 007 and the exquisite Diana Rigg as the Italian countess he loves, marries and mourns—is actually my second-favorite entry in the series. Certainly Roger Moore was a comparatively lightweight Bond with his seven appearances in the series [...]
Mr. Moore was succeeded, briefly, by Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights (1987) and License to Kill (1989). Actually, Mr. Dalton came the closest to Mr. Craig in projecting stormy virility, and it was rumored that he did most of his own stunts. Still, Mr. Dalton’s vehicles were considered impediments to the flagging but still profitable property. Pierce Brosnan stepped into the breach with Goldeneye (1995), ably directed by Martin Campbell, who was to direct Casino Royale more than a decade later. Indeed, Mr. Brosnan was graced with unusually ambitious directors for his next (and last) three films in the franchise: Roger Spottiswoode’s Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Michael Apted’s The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day (2002).
My recurring problem with Mr. Connery’s Bond vis-à-vis Mr. Craig’s—admittedly in retrospect—is that, though Mr. Connery was the coolest and smoothest of all the Bonds, his coolness and smoothness would curdle over the course of a movie into a smug facetiousness. I must hasten to add that this wasn’t true of most of his non-Bond roles.
Of course, Casino Royale has been adapted from Fleming’s first novel about 007, and so the character can profit from the vulnerability of a novice agent pitted against an ever more evil world. Bond’s relationship with his superior, M (Judi Dench), in London gets off to a rocky start when he blows up an African embassy in Madagascar after a spectacular pursuit of an agile bomb-dealer named Mollaka (Sebastien Foucan). The joke is that the whole city seems to be under construction, enabling Bond and Mollaka to exploit every unfinished construction site and skeletal edifice in their chase. The grim-faced Mr. Craig has already been introduced as a deadpan killer with a sense of humor about his comparatively new vocation, but it is a dry-as-dust humor that he purveys. I must confess that at first I couldn’t tell him apart from the villains in the crowd scenes—and this is good for a supposed undercover agent. As he flits about with seeming effortlessness from Madagascar to the Bahamas to Montenegro to Venice for the movie’s watery climax—part of the franchise’s formula—he never loses control of a character who manages to be stoical and feverish at one and the same time. Even when he is poisoned to within a heartbeat of death, and then later tortured in the most imaginatively painful way, some irreducible part of Mr. Craig’s Bond remains on the alert.
The poisoning occurs during a titanically high-stakes poker game in a Montenegrin gambling casino—a sequence that seems unusually prolonged, possibly to justify the title of the film and its opening playing-card credits. (There are spoilers to follow, so readers of tender sensibility should avert their eyes here.) After the high suspense created by visual cues attesting to the hypnotic power of kings and jacks, Bond finally wins his showdown with the arch villain Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), with a low-black-card straight flush beating Le Chiffre’s high-card full house. It helps that Le Chiffre is afflicted with an ocular problem that causes him to shed tears of blood; it also helps the film that Mr. Mikkelsen is slightly better looking than Mr. Craig, making the battle between good and evil onscreen visually more complex.
From her first briefing of 007, M makes it crystal clear that no ideological issues are involved in Bond’s hunt for arms merchants in the bomb trade; the only motive for Le Chiffre, his cohorts and even his enemies is money. This disclaimer neatly severs Casino Royale from the never-ending war on terror, both here and in Britain, which may be a good thing for the film—Bond is thereby released from getting an uncharacteristically patriotic gleam in his eye as he disposes of his antagonists.
What distinguishes Mr. Craig’s Bond from all the others, except Mr. Lazenby’s, is his expression of both passion and grief after winning and losing Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, who seems for a time to have betrayed him—though, as it turns out, she has saved his life, not once but twice. The relationship begins on the comically sarcastic note that always bodes well for any movie relationship. Vesper displays a flair for the veiled insult, and Bond responds with a faintly amused curiosity. But he has been chastened by a previous affair that has gone badly for the married woman he recklessly bedded. The world he lives in is too dangerous for him to lightly contemplate another romantic adventure, but the rush of violent circumstances drive Vesper and Bond into each other’s arms, where they remain until their prior alliances rise up to engulf them. That Bond so convincingly retains his composure and sang-froid throughout all the horrors that ensue is a testament to Mr. Craig’s abilities as an actor, and to Mr. Campbell’s astuteness as a director.
People might think that my guiding mantra for Casino Royale and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (and most other movies as well) happens to be cherchez la femme. But change that to aimez la femme and I’d plead pleasurably guilty, even as I wholeheartedly recommend Casino Royale as one of the best pictures of the year—not that it will need much help at the box office.
Three very interesting reviews. Too long for me to comment on them at length. I particularly appreciate both reviewers belief Connery is the coolest Bond.
By Bosley Crowther - June 14 1967 - New York Times
Although there's a lot more science-fiction than there is first-vintage James Bond in "You Only Live Twice," the fifth in a series of veritable Bond films with Sean Connery, there's enough of the bright and bland bravado of the popular British super-sleuth mixed into this melee of rocket-launching to make it a bag of good Bond fun. And there's so much of that scientific clatter — so much warring of super-capsules out in space and fussing with electronic gadgets in a great secret underground launching pad—that this wayout adventure picture should be the joy and delight of the youngsters and give pleasure to the reasonable adults who can find release in the majestically absurd.Are your nerves frayed and mind bewildered by the war in the Middle East? Give them a rest via this violent excursion with Double-O Seven in Japan. Go with him on this crucial mission to find out whence come those cannibal capsules that move in to devour those American spaceships that are innocently orbiting the earth, and plunge with him into the strange crater of that dead volcano on the Japanese coast to discover it isn't the Russians who are doing the mischief and save us by a hair's breadth from World War III.You may find the noise slightly deafening when the chasing autos scream around those Tokyo curves, or the four massive enemy helicopters loose their machineguns on the minicopter carrying Bond, or especially when the Japanese commandos rain down upon that secret launching pad and assist Bond in happily blasting this Spectral installation to smithereens.This noisy and wildly violent picture, which opened yesterday at the Astor, the Victoria, the Baronet and Loew's Orpheum, is evidently pegged to the notion that nothing succeeds like excess. And because it is shamelessly excessive, it is about a half-hour too long.Probably its profligate producers. Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, figured they had spent so much on it—on that fantastic launching pad set, which could be put down at Expo 67 and be a hit pavilion; on a sparkling color production and some beautiful location shooting in Japan—that they wanted Lewis Gilbert, the director, to keep it going as long as he could.As a consequence, there is a lengthy build-up of tooling around Tokyo with Bond, buzzing through a wrestling arena, stealing secrets from a chemical company's safe, firming a Japanese contact and trifling casually here and there with a few girls, before it gets to an even lengthier playout of the discovery and raid on the launching pad.Through it all, Mr. Connery paces with his elegant nonchalance a little more non than usual (he is evidently getting slightly bored), but altogether able in the clinches and in tossing off the gags of Roald Dahl. Able as conspirators and scenery are several lovely Japanese girls whose names are so superfluous and difficult there is no point in spelling them out. A fellow named Tetsuro Tamba is dandy as a Japanese partner-spy, and Donald Pleasence is grandly grotesque as the evil genius who would rule the world.It is notable that only Bond, the title and the location of an Ian Fleming book have been used by Mr. Dahl in writing his screenplay. The rest, with, just a Dahl touch here and there, is blueprint Bond stuff cum science-fiction. The sex is minimal. But, then, Bond is getting old. And so, I would guess, is anybody who can't get a few giggles from this film.
END OF REVIEW
Ken Adam’s volcano set is his masterpiece of the whole series - it can only be truly appreciated when seen on a cinema screen.
Review of DR. NO By Bosley Crowther - New York Times - 30 May 1963
IF you haven't yet made the acquaintance of Ian Fleming's suave detective, James Bond, in the author's fertile series of mystery thrillers akin to the yarns of Mickey Spillane, here's your chance to correct that misfortune in one quick and painless stroke. It's by seeing this first motion picture made from a Fleming novel, "Dr. No."This lively, amusing picture, which opened yesterday at the Astor, the Murray Hill and other theaters in the "premiere showcase" group, is not to be taken seriously as realistic fiction or even art, any more than the works of Mr. Fleming are to be taken as long-hair literature. It is strictly a tinseled action-thriller, spiked with a mystery of a sort. And, if you are clever, you will see it as a spoof of science-fiction and sex.For the crime-detecting adventure that Mr. Bond is engaged in here is so wildly exaggerated, so patently contrived, that it is obviously silly and not to be believed. It is a perilous task of discovering who is operating a device on the tropical island of Jamaica that "massively interferes" with the critical rocket launchings from Cape Canaveral.Nonsense, you say. Of course, it's nonsense — pure, escapist bunk, with Bond, an elegant fellow, played by Sean Connery, doing everything (and everybody) that an idle day-dreamer might like to do. Called from a gaming club in London to pick up his orders and his gun and hop on a plane for Jamaica before a tawny temptress leads him astray, old "Double Oh Seven" (that's his code name) is in there being natty from the start. And he keeps on being natty, naughty and nifty to the end.It's not the mystery that entertains you, it's the things that happen along the way—the attempted kidnapping at the Jamaica airport, the tarantula dropped onto Bond's bed, the seduction of the Oriental beauty, the encounter with the beautiful blond bikini-clad Ursula Andress on the beach of Crab Key. And it's all of these things happening so smoothly in the lovely Jamaica locale, looking real and tempting in color, that recommend this playful British film.The ending, which finds Joseph Wiseman being frankly James Masonish in an undersea laboratory that looks like something inspired by Oak Ridge, is a bit too extravagant and silly, and likewise too frantic and long. But something outrageous had to be found with which to end the reckless goings-on.
END OF REVIEW
Americans had to wait about 8 months more than we did in the UK to see the first Bond film - and Bosley Crowther is clearly a bit more impressed than he lets on in this review.
I like his style, not just because he liked the films. He had a nice turn of phrase and a good sense of humour.
Looking back, it's funny how many of the major critics could only admit to liking the Bond films by treating them as complete jokes. God forbid that I, a serious critic, should heartily recommend a disreputable genre film, but "if you are clever, you will see it as a spoof of science-fiction and sex." And so the critics get to flatter themselves and praise what they would have been otherwise embarassed to rave about. All it took were a few corny one-liners! But decades later the reviews sound weird, because the early Bond films were not complete jokes--at least not in comaparison to the later ones...
@Revelator Agreed. How dare the general public want movies that actually entertain them!
Our friendly critic Bosley Crowther now casts his eyes over From Russia With Love, once again having to wait over 6 months from the British release date.
9th April 1964
SECRET AGENT 007 is very much with us again, and anyone who hasn't yet got to know him is urged to do so right away! He is, of course, the snappy fellow who goes by the name of James Bond in Ian Fleming's thrilling novels and is reproduced on the screen by an equally snappy actor by the name of Sean Connery. His reappearance in this instance is in the second delightfully wild film made from a Fleming novel, "From Russia With Love."Don't miss it! This is to say, don't miss it if you can still get the least bit of fun out of lurid adventure fiction and pseudo-realistic fantasy. For this mad melodramatization of a desperate adventure of Bond with sinister characters in Istanbul and on the Orient Express is fictional exaggeration on a grand scale and in a dashing style, thoroughly illogical and improbable, but with tongue blithely wedged in cheek. Again good old "Double Oh Seven" is sent by his London chief, "M," to look into a promised opportunity to tweak the hide of the Russians in the Near East. It seems there's a secret mechanism called a Lektor that may be filched from the Soviet Embassy in Turkey, if the cards — and the cads — are smartly played. This means the agent who does it must work in consort with a beautiful girl and a Turkish voluptuary, which is right down old "Double Oh Seven's" street. Of course, he doesn't know the whole set-up is a diabolical plant of that international apparatus, Spectre, aimed to snag Lektor for itself and also to place its favorite nemesis in the gravest jeopardy. And he doesn't sense that the strange and solemn fellow who tails him all over the place is a homicidal paranoiac ("the best kind") working for Spectre, until almost too late. Well, there's no point in trying to tell you all the mad, naughty things that take place — the meetings with mysterious people, the encounters with beautiful girls, the bomb explosions, the chases, the violent encounter of Bond with a helicopter, a motor boat race. Nor is there any point in trying to locate the various characters in the plot, all of whom are deliciously fantastic and delightfully well played. There's Lotte Lenya as an arch Spectre agent, Robert Shaw as the paranoiac, Pedro Armendariz as the jovial Turkish contact and Daniela Bianchi as the beautiful girl. And, oh, how beautiful, luscious and voluptuous she is! Even old "Double Oh Seven" cannot resist her, and takes her home at the end. Terence Young has directed the whole thing grandly, with some color photography of Istanbul and surrounding country that gives it the proper key. Don't ask any more. Just go to see it and have yourself a good time. It is at the Astor and other "showcase" theaters.
END OF REVIEW
DIAMONDS...
After what was announced as Sean Connery’s positively last appearance as Bond (in You Only Live Twice), we had George Lazenby making what proved to be his last appearance as anyone in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Whatever the cause, and it is reasonable to suppose that money had something to do with it, Connery then changed his mind and may now be seen easing his way through and into the machinery of Diamonds are Forever, hand as steady as ever on glass, steering wheel or lady, mouth occasionally crinkling to emit an innuendo. The new Bond, the seventh if we ignore the aberrant Casino Royale, lets one down sadly in the pre-credit sequence – the particularly stunning openers still belong to From Russia With Love and Goldfinger – which here has some unclear and messy business relating to mud baths and plastic surgery. Thereafter, things pick up and Bond is soon on his way to look int a diamond smuggling racket. From Amsterdam and an encounter with toothsome Tiffany Case (Jill St John) as well as a fight to the death in a lift-shaft, Bond wings into Los Angeles with a coffin and narrowly avoids incineration in a Las Vegas mortuary. Two camp villains crop up all over and one of the more genial moments finds them gazing raptly as an exploding helicopter before wandering off into the desert hand-in-hand.
Blofeld, of course, is at the back of it all, previously incarnated by Donald Pleasance and Telly Savalas but here done to a turn by Charles Gray. Once again, he’s intent on bringing the world powers to their knees and all those diamonds are needed for a lethal kind of reflector satellite. No matter, the unpursuable plot gives Bond a chance to break out of a clandestine research centre, careering over hill and dale in a lunar vehicle, and, later, to indulge in the greatest car chase in living memory, with police automobiles banging into one another like drunks at a wake and James speeding to safety through a narrow alley on two wheels. Bon Simmons and Paul Baxley are listed as stunt arrangers and probably deserve equal billing with ken Adam, whose sets are well up to par, and Mr Connery. Two athletic musclewomen, Bambi and Thumpe, add to the gaiety and one was glad to see Q (Desmond Llewelwyn) coming up to scratch with peel-off false fingerprints and a jackpot winning way with rows of one-armed bandits. Events culminating in a seaborne blowup go on too lomng, but the queer couple make a last minute assault that Bond foils by a nice combination of winemanship and brute force. Guy Hamilton directed.
John Coleman, New Statesman, 7 January 1972
I’m not keen on his dismissal of Lazenby, the rest is a summary of the film rather than a critique.
Here's Pauline Kael's review of Diamonds Are Forever, from the January 15, 1972 issue of the New Yorker.
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Diamonds Are Forever starts with a full head of steam, and one expects a luxuriant, mock-sadistic good time. But a few minutes later Sean Connery, as Bond, and a villain are in a tiny elevator, lunging at each other and pounding at each other with excruciatingly amplified blows; the sequence goes on and on, and the movie loses its insolent cool. The Bond pictures depend on the comic pornography of brutality; the violence has to be witty. When people are just slugging each other, as in any movie fight, the point of the picture is blunted. This movie never recovers for long.
The script (by Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz) involves diamond smuggling and old Blofeld; it's a wilted affair with deep-in-the-closet bitch-fag villains. The one new character with possibilities, a billionaire Las Vegas recluse modelled on Howard Hughes, is dimly written, and played—shall we say rustically?—by Jimmy Dean. (He acts as if someone had just suggested to him that he turn actor but hadn’t told him how.) The picture isn’t bad; it’s merely tired, and it’s often noisy when it means to be exciting.
Guy Hamilton directs more or less adequately, but he isn’t precise enough for nonchalance—for the right, perfectly careless throwaway-joke tone. Hamilton doesn't parody urbanity and flippancy, because he’s still struggling to achieve them. The Ken Adam sets just sit there, and the film doesn’t have anything like those flamboyant sequences in the snow—the ski chase and the bobsled run—that were quite literally dazzling in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
What's missing may be linked to the absence of Peter Hunt, who worked on the action sequences of all the earlier Bonds, and who directed the last one; perhaps it was he who gave the series its distinctive quality of aestheticized thrills. The daring seemed beautiful in the earlier films—precariously glorified. This time, even when a sequence works (that is, both daring and funny) such as the car chase, and the battle between Connery and the black and white Amazons, it lacks elegance and visual opulence; it looks like sequences of the same kind in Bond imitations. No doubt those of us who love the Bond pictures are spoiled, but really we’ve come to expect more than a comic car chase.
Customers may, however, be happy enough with what they get. Diamonds Are Forever has opened just at the moment when people long for the familiar, stable, unalienated hero with a capacity for enjoyment; the timing could not be better for Sean Connery to come back as Bond. He no longer wears the waxy deadpan of a sex-fantasy stud dummy; over the years he has turned the robot-matinee-idol Bond into a man—himself. The foppery and gadgetry have diminished, and the sexual conquests, too. Almost imperceptively, Bond has lost his upper-class snobbery along with the toiletries; it’s as if that snotty, enigmatic Bond disgusted Connery. His instinct was right: it’s better this way, because Connery’s mock-heroic presence incarnates the appeal of the series without need of the commodity accoutrements of a modern pasha—without need even of a harem. Bond doesn’t seem a phony anymore.
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Note: Peter Hunt remarked in an interview: "Broccoli asked me to come back for Diamonds Are Forever, but at that time he and Saltzman were fighting and I was involved with something else. I told them that if they moved the production date I might be able to, but they couldn't and so they went with Guy Hamilton. I did, however, get a beautiful review from Pauline Kael on that, who said, 'The one thing missing from this film is Peter Hunt' (laughs)."
Kael's review is better than Coleman's. As pointed out above, she offers an opinion of the film which barely passes Coleman's pen he's so busy reminding us what came before and what we might see. Her assessment is quite astute, I think, and I am glad she liked Connery's laid back, more mature Bond. I disagree that the violence is misplaced and I also find DAF quite hilarious. Perhaps Pauline had a sense of humour failure once the fists started to fly...
I’m no fan of Pauline Kael’s reviews but she did hit the nail on the head when stating that the Peter Hunt influence was badly missing - in fact the series never really recovered without him and took off in a different direction.
Here’s the DAF review from the NYT
By Peter Schjeld - December 26 1971
IAN FLEMING was one of John F. Kennedy's favorite authors, and, when you think about it, the JFK years were often a lot like Ian Fleming's novels, with sexy personalities, amazing technologies and an atmosphere of constant, cosmic peril. Remember the Missile Gap, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Green Berets, crash funding for NASA, Red aggression in Vietnam? It was great theater, involving vast expenditures of money and adrenalin, and a national audience teetered between exhilaration and panic. It was also about that time that two bright men named Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli cashed in on this audience's hunger for more of the same by commencing to produce James Bond movies.
It all seems a long time ago, and it has been. It has even been a long time since the last Bond movie starring Sean Connery, “You Only Live Twice” (an interim attempt to go it without Connery, “In Her Majesty's Secret Service,” went ker‐plop); it has been four years, which is long enough for the whole world to have changed once or twice. But here he is again, Connery as Bond in a Saltzman‐Broccoli megaproduction directed by Guy (“Goldfinger”) Hamilton, “Diamonds Are Forever,” and folks are lining up in subfreezing temperatures at theaters all over town to see it. The fellow behind me on line at the Waverly confided to a companion that this would be only the second movie he had seen in three years.
“Diamonds Are Forever” stands to make about a zillion dollars, and nostalgia of an especially piercing sort will have a lot to do with it. Simply, the Bond brand of escapist fantasy—to a world where the two eternal verities are money and power and the two foregone conclusions are violence and sex —scratches an itch, and it's an itch that nothing else in the emotionally torpid Nixon era can reach as directly. Bond is as authentic an article of the sixties as Fred Astaire was of the thirties, and the issue of “quality” hardly seems germane. I don't imagine many of the thousands of people who’ rushed to see “Diamonds Are Forever” when it opened paused en route to check the reviews. They just rushed.
It is, as it happens, a pretty good movie—not great art, but fantastic packaging. The best (or, anyway, the best worst) of the classic formulae—notably, gimmickry and exoticism a go go—have been retained, some up‐dating elements have been added and other elements have been fudged. For instance, all the old folderol about guns is played down; in place of his former phallic cannon, Bond now packs a modest little automatic and, as I recall, never does shoot anybody with it—though naturally he is called on now and then to dispatch a baddy, usually in a bizarre manner. In general, the tone of Connery's Bond has gotten mellower, like a train whistle demonstrating the Doppler Effect. And, indeed, the softening of the Bond image undoubtedly is the effect of a kind of recession in time, as its supporting myths (the Cold War, for example) are gradually out‐distanced by history.
Not that Bond is in any imminent danger of becoming a mere friendly ghost of his former self. A rat‐a‐tat pre‐credit sequence, showing him being passably vicious with a series of people from whom he wants information, makes sure we are aware Df that. One in the series is a bikinied beauty. “There's something I want you to get off your chest,” he says, snatching the bra and twisting it around her throat. Of course, if Bond ever actually ceased to be a sexist bully, and if the type of his wit were really refined (say, from sledge hammer to ball peen), he would simply no longer be Bond, and it would be all over. As it is, he beds only one woman in this movie (Jill St. John, so you know his taste hasn't. failed him), and I suspect that's a record.
The cutest of several new wrinkles in “Diamonds Are Forever” is a winsome pair of homosexual killers (Bruce Cabot and Bruce Glover), so charming they practically steal the show. They would, moreover, be worth mentioning if only as an instance of the cunning with which script‐writers Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz (what the film has in common with Fleming's novel, a friend tells me, is mainly its title) wire their inventions into the Bond audience's stock‐reaction centers. For these fey killers are, by all odds, the least sinister villains in any Bond movie, and one can only conclude that their seaminess (earning them one of the most atrocious ends in movie history) is to be inferred from the fact that they are homosexual. Not that I'm really objecting. In such an engine of total fantasy manipulation as “Diamonds Are Forever,” the anti‐gay element is just another little sprocket.
There doesn't seem to he much point in going into the plot, which as usual develops fast at the start and at the end, is mostly picaresque in the middle and begins to go wobbly under the weight of its accumulated preposterousness at about the point where the middle and end overlap. The emotional climax, for me, was a stupendously funny and exciting car chase about halfway through, a sort of mechanical ballet celebrating the destructibility of American sedans. This seems to have been it for the rest of the audience, too; mostly youthful, they had been whooping it up in the early going but sank into listless silence later, not to be stirred even by the crash‐boom of the obligatory closing fire fight (on an oil rig in the Pacific this time).
A new James Bond movie, if you love movies, may be a bit like a Superbowl game between two teams you hate, if you love football. You watch it with plenty of misgivings, but how can you not watch it? It is a kind of national rite. Moreover, it is an occasion that can remind you of what the movie business used to be like in America; for a moment it reconvenes the great mass audience long since lost to television hack before the silver screen. Assuming you cherish few illusions about the perfectibility of human moral attitudes, how can that be bad—especially when what the people are watching has class? And “Diamonds Are Forever,” the richest and ripest of the Bond flicks, has class, and that's good.
END OF REVIEW
It seems that it doesn’t matter who does the Bond reviews in the NYT they all seem to say it’s not great art but it is great fun - what else does a Bond fan want? (I know, I know, a new film every two years is what we do want!)
To prove your point, here's the New York Times review of OHMSS, by A.H. Weiler (December 19, 1969).
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A bare fact must be faced. The superheated screen activities of Ian Fleming's supersleuth and sex symbol, James Bond, are as inevitable as sex or crime or On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the sixth steaming annal in the sock 'em and spoof 'em spy series that crashed into the DeMille and other local theaters yesterday.
Serious criticism of such an esteemed institution would be tantamount to throwing rocks at Buckingham Palace, but it does call for a handful of pebbles. Devotees will note that Sean Connery, the virile, suave conqueror of all those dastards and dames in the five previous capers, has given up his 007 Bond credentials to George Lazenby, a 30-year-old Australian newcomer to films. He's tall, dark, handsome and has a dimpled chin. But Mr. Lazenby, if not a spurious Bond, is merely a casual, pleasant, satisfactory replacement.
For the record, he plays a decidedly second fiddle to an overabundance of continuous action, a soundtrack as explosive as the London Blitz, and flip dialogue and characterizations set against some authentic, truly spectacular Portuguese and Swiss scenic backgrounds, caught in eyecatching colors.
What are Bond's problems now? They're too numerous, as usual, to hold the constant attention of anyone other than a charter member of Her Majesty's Secret Service. What sets our bully boy off and fighting, running, shooting and loving this time is a lissome, leggy lass mysteriously bent on drowning herself in the waves thunderously crashing on a lonely Portuguese beach.
First thing you know he's involved in a battle with two toughs that is as full of karate chops and belts in the belly as a brawl in a Singapore alley. To the credit of Richard Maibaum, the scenarist, the film's tongue-in-cheek attitude is set right at the outset. Once our new Bond emerges triumphant, he turns to the audience and says, somewhat plaintively: 'This never happened to the other fellow.'
But it does. The lady of his life, the svelte Diana Rigg, who learned her karate chops from the British TV 'Avenger' series, is the daughter of the blandly effete Gabriele Ferzetti, Mafioso-like tycoon, who likes Bond and wants to destroy that Spectre chief, Telly Savalas, his competition in world crime. That suits Bond too, and practically right off he's in Switzerland, where our villain maintains an eyrie atop an Alp.
It's an inaccessible retreat, supposedly an institute for allergy research complete with hired guns, scientific gimmicks and an international conclave of allegedly allergic beauties who are really being brainwashed by the oily, bald-domed Mr. Savalas to spread his biological destruction of the world's food supply. Get it?
Bond dallies with the dolls, of course, but the heart of the matter is a series of chases shot by the 41-year-old Peter Hunt, second unit director of the previous adventures, who's making his directorial debut with this one. The chases are breakneck, devastating affairs.
A viewer must remember what seems to be the longest ski chase and bobsled run ever, full of gunfire and spills, that even includes an avalanche. There also is a decibel-filled fight amid clanging Swiss cow bells, the jarring bombing of that eyrie by helicopter-borne rescuers and the inadvertent clashes of the escaping Bond and Miss Rigg in a slithering, bang-up stock car race. One must say amen to a colleague's observation: "I never expected to see Switzerland defoliated like 'this.'
It should be reported that the producers and distributors already have rung up a reported $82,200,000 on their first five Bond issues. It is not ungallant to report that Bond marries Miss Rigg, who is gunned down and killed by Savalas on their honeymoon. So it is reasonable to expect that Bond inevitably will be loving, shooting and running again.
"Not ungallant"? I can think of other phrases to describe rudely spoiling the ending for those who haven't read the book.
I thought the same - I bet EON were miffed about that !
Peter Schjeld writes about DAF how I have felt going to watch SF, SP and NTTD. I miss the joy:
A new James Bond movie, if you love movies, may be a bit like a Superbowl game between two teams you hate, if you love football. You watch it with plenty of misgivings, but how can you not watch it? It is a kind of national rite.
My impression is that critics of that era didn't really care about spoilers, despite (or because of?) the fact that movies ran much longer in theaters back then. Interesting that the NYT reviewer for DAF claims that OHMSS "went ker‐plop" when it clearly didn't--the film was neither a financial or critical flop. But the minute Connery returned to the role, Lazenby was regarded as a failure, and that impression extended to his film, until it became more accessible on home video.
but it was only a few years earlier Hitchcocks ad campaign for Psycho was centred round his personal demand to not give away the shock ending. that was a popular movie, youd think the No Spoilers philosophy would've caught on
Review of LALD by Vincent Canby in the NYT 15th July 1973.
In “Live and Let Die,” the James Bond novel that Tom Mankiewicz has had the good sense to rewrite almost completely for the screen, the late Ian Fleming introduces Mr. Big, the villain of the piece, in exposition presented in the form of the following dialogue:
“'I don't think I've ever heard of a great Negro criminal before,’ said Bond. ‘Chinamen, of course. the men behind the opium trade. There've been some big‐time Japs, mostly in pearls and drugs. Plenty of Negroes mixed up in diamonds and gold in Africa, but always in a small way. They don't seem to take to big business. Pretty law‐abiding chaps, on the whole, should have thought.’
“'Our man's a bit of an excetption.’ said M. ‘He's not pure Negro. Born in Haiti, Good dose of French blood. Trained in Moscow, too, as you'll see from the file. And the Negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions—scienlists, doctors, writers. It's about time they turned out a criminal. ’ “
“Live and Let Die,” which was published in 1954, is filled with casual prejudices that today seem dumbfounding, especially that reference to Mr. Big's being a bit of an exception because he's not pure Negro. Mr. Big, says Fleming, has an advantage over most Negroes because he possesses a good dose of French blood and was trained in Moscow, presumably (I think that Fleming would have thought) the same Moscow that would have embraced a man on the order of Paul Robeson. Even Fleming’s use of the word “dose” to describe French ancestry says something about what the English novelist fears about the free‐loving French.
Live and Let Die,” the novel, is a true period piece, though not necessarily of the 1950's. Its snobberies are turn‐of‐the‐century while its plot—some nonsense about. buried Jamaican pirate treasure that's being used to finance Soviet espionage activities in the United States —goes back even further, to Robert Louis Stevenson, desperately updated.
James Bond, the movie rather than novel hero, was first acted by Sean Connery and has been taken over by Roger Moore in “Live and Let Die” with no visible ill effects, is still very much a figure of the more conservative 1960's when “Dr. No,” the initial film in the Bond series, was released. He's a natty though hardly a mod dresser. His haircut couldn't possibly have offended the late J. Edgar Hoover and his language is remarkably free of the sort of expletives that aren't allowed on prime‐time.
Yet, in several ways, “Live and Let Die” is more liberated, more uninhibited, less uptight than any number of contemporary fantasy‐feeding black films like “The Mack” and “Cleopatra Jones.”
Tom Mankiewicz, who wrote the screenplay and virtually a whole new plot for “Live and Let Die,” Guy Hamilton, who directed the film, and Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, who produced it (as they did seven of the eight earlier Bond films), have created a most unusual entertainment. “Live and Let Die” is certainly not a black film - though it is black‐oriented in a way that no earlier Bond film was—and it must be labeled more or less right‐wing, if only because it doesn't have any easily identifiable political or social concerns in its head. I say this perfectly aware that in Mankiewicz's new plot Bond's mission is to destroy a huge heroin‐smuggling operation, based not on Jamaica (though the film was partially photographed there) but on a fictitious Caribbean island named San Monique. However, Bond carries out his duties as unencumbered by ideology as a plumber. It's his job and he does it for the good life it affords him. Similarly, the villains in the film, all of whom are black, are motivated principally by personal gain.
This may not be a surprising virtue to find in a film as earnestly dedicated to the pleasure principle as “Live and Let Die,” but it's a refreshing change from most black exploitation films, which tend to be sensational garbage wrapped in piety, and from white “message” films, which tend to be pious garbage wrapped in sensation.
Even though its gags and one liners (especially those having to do with Bond's prodigious sexual prowess) are stunningly obvious (but sometimes funny, in the way familiar old vaudeville routines are funny), the film's point of view is so civilized that it renders most prejudices ridiculous by royally ingoring them.
It appreciates the style, wit and cleverness of Mr. Big (Yaphet Kotto), though it never patronizes him. Black and white are equally matched throughout the film (even in the credits, which, if I remember correctly, divide their attention between a beautiful white dancer and a beautiful black dancer), but the purpose of the film is not to promote equality. The film simply reflects it as if there were no question about the matter. This, too, is fantasy, perhaps, but it seems to me to be a lot healthier than fantasies about black or white supercats who pretend to be socially conscious.
Just how civilized the film is, I think, is reflected in the fact that it is able to exploit, in a single coherent narrative, sinister Caribbean voodoo rites, a crooked black island dictator, a sense of real black brotherhood, the supremacy of James Bond at almost everything, and a redneck Louisiana sheriff who, as played by Clifton James, becomes one of the funniest characters you'll probably see on screen all year.
This last I find particularly startling, for it wasn't very long ago (say as long ago as “Easy Rider”) that this character was a figure of almost mythical dread. He couldn't be treated comically. Our liberal sentiments wouldn't allow it. Today he can be. And we can have a black villain matching wits against a white hero without immediately seeing it in terms of a social or political confrontation.
In its odd, off‐hand sort of way, “Live and Let Die” turns old stereotypes inside out.
However, I don't want to put you off “Live and Let Die” by overstressing its social importance. It's pop entertainment, carefully calculated to amuse as many people as possible, black as well as white, and thus to make fortunes for everyone connected with it. It thus honorably carries on the tradition established in the earlier Bond films (on two of which, “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever,” Hamilton and Mankiewicz have also collaborated successfully). The titles, plots and gadgets are now beginning to run together, but the intelligence of the series remains highly distinctive.
END OF REVIEW
I think this is a decent review of the then current situation of blaxploitation films and how LALD transcends the genre - and of course, the final paragraph which praises the film and the series as a whole.
Yes, a good appreciation of LALD in context of the contemporary blaxploitation phenomenon.
Agreed, a sensible overview of the most racially controversial Bond story.
(Mankiewicz had nothing to do with GF, though.)